New prompt: describe an emotion without naming it or using any adjectives at all

[Ella10]

A genuinely difficult constraint this month. Pick an emotion, anything, grief, joy, dread, longing, and describe it in a poem of your choosing without ever naming the emotion directly and without using a single adjective anywhere in the piece

The reason this is hard is that adjectives are usually the lazy shortcut for emotion in poetry, sad rain, joyful morning, and removing them forces everything to live in verbs, nouns and structure instead, which is exactly where the strongest emotional writing usually already lives anyway

The craft principle hiding underneath the game, an emotion described through what a person DOES rather than what they FEEL almost always lands harder, the reader assembles the feeling themselves from the actions rather than being told what to feel directly, which is a much more powerful kind of trust between writer and reader

Usual rules apply, any length up to twenty lines, critique the poem not the poet, say if you want detailed feedback, and post the emotion you were aiming for separately underneath so readers can check whether the poem actually landed it without any of the words that would have made it easy

[TomTiz]

Attempted grief and the no adjectives rule forced me into pure action, someone setting two cups down and only filling one, the poem never says sad and everyone who read it named the feeling correctly, the constraint works